LIGHTYEAR

LIGHTYEAR. Angus MacLane, director; story, with Matthew Aldrich. Jason Headley, script. Tim Evatt, production design.[1] USA: Pixar Animation Studios, Pixar, Walt Disney Pictures (production) / Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures (distribution US, UK, and most of Earth), 2022.[2][3]

A Pixar animation, suitable for children and for scholars interested in a number of motifs (or tropes) with allusions to earlier films as a kind of visual citation for the borrowing.[4]

Note images in this fairly serious Buzz Lightyear space opera about space rangers in a spaceship (that is compared to a gigantic — and necessarily technological — turnip) initially engaged in space travel, and frequent shots of people in space suits[5] and other enclosing protections from environments that can kill.

• Hypersleep in «coffin» such as in 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (film) and the ALIEN (film) series (and upright, as in the premise for the TV show Futurama). 

• Space suits on the borderline of fighting suits (cf. and contrast Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers but not the film, and Joe Haldeman's The Forever War); see in The Mechanical God: Machines in Science FictionLeonard Heldreth's "In Search of the Ultimate Weapon: The Fighting Machine in Science Fiction Novels and Films." 

• At the extreme end of a continuum starting with space suits and moving into fighting suit: military robots, some with only minimal heads. Also note a fighting suit that appears to be a robot, with demonic suggestions and just possibly a visual allusion to one or more of the high-born Teutonic knights in Sergei Eisenstein's ALEXANDER NEVSKY, and/or DisneyCorp's own THE BLACK HOLE (film).

• One set of threatening aliens are arthropodal, for their images along with the suited humans and robots, see Thomas Dunn and Richard D. Erlich on "The Ovion/Cylon Alliance." 

Also:

• A robot cat ("Sox") as a therapy animal, but with skills up there with those of R2D2 in the STAR WARS series, but add that this AI cat can speak English. And the cat can, perhaps, keep Buzz in line.[6]

• An advanced autopilot, IVAN or I.V.A.N., that can get problematic.[7] Cf. and contrast HAL in 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY film and novel.

• Perhaps a pentagon or two and other polygons, but definitely a number of hexagons.[8]

RDE, finishing, 20Jun22